Re: Optimizer: Rules-based going away? When?

On the integration of Rule-based and Cost-based methods, I used to use Ingres which is entirely Cost based (and pretty good at that...so maybe Oracle will get it working properly). If there were no stats on a table, it had used something similar to rule-based but enhanced by the fact that it knew how large the respective tables were. This meant that it could tell if a less precise match (eg partial key) on a small table would produce more or fewer results than a more exact match on a massive table (eg range of exact key matches).
 However, I think this might be the worst of both worlds, leaving the user (or developer) with little control, and the server fairly ignorant.  For my two-pennyworth, I found rule based pretty poor on views, since it's difficult to control how the conditions that form the view mesh with those imposed by the query. I would have thought this would get worse if things started being looked at from an object point of view, so I'm guessing that rule based will be dropped in or about Oracle 8.  Wonder when they'll get rid of the anomaly of empty strings being treated as nul. I seem to recall one of their manuals mentioning that this might change in a future release.

    Gary

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Gary Myers, Analyst/Programmer, Kaisha Technology, West of England